In the summer of ’92, Team USA Basketball put together “the greatest team ever assembled in the history of team sports.” If you missed NBA TV’s long-awaited special on the squad, the 90 minute trip down memory lane lived up to the billing. Watch it now courtesy of Jose3030.

I knew I could depend on you guys for this you have no idea how badly I was at work waiting to get off just to watch this once I started seeing the trailer for this during the playoffs it brings up so many memeories as a basketball fan thanks for posting this

Being from Chicago at that time, there’s one thing that goes overlooked:

Isiah Thomas had the worst childhood of everyone he fought with in the NBA. Zeke’s old hood was blocks from mine—near Brazil caliber poverty. Zeke was so poor that Bobby Knight usedta say “until I recruited Isiah, I didn’t know people lived like this.” Normally Knight raised hell at the notion of cats leaving early, but Thomas was the poorest kid he’d seen in years so he understood him chasing paper.

None of the cats on the Dream Team came from broken homes or the degree of poverty that Zeke did. And I’ve always been convinced that this bothered Thomas and fueled alot of the fights he got in over the years… He was never “the golden boy”/”one of the guys” in the league.

And in CHicago, MJ was so NOT from the Hood, yet we wanted him to be. Conversely, Zeke was from OUR hood and we overlooked him for flashier cats like MJ…

There’s other ish that goes overlooked like how the NBA unloaded the CBA on Thomas then developed a counter D-League and sunk him…

I’ve been saying this for years. Zeke was an asshole. Zeke could be a son of a bitch. Zeke was a lot of things, but a hoe he was not. People hated him because he always played with a chip on his shoulder and he didn’t care who it was – Bird or Jordan be damned.

That fool wanted to win and he would resort to playground tactics to do so. From everything I’ve read, heard and learned about Zeke, his upbringing caused him to play with such reckless abandoned and people who weren’t on his team could never understand that.

Like I said, he was no angel, but dude got blackballed. You can make a serious argument he’s the best PG ever not named Magic.

I’m from Gary,IN right next to Chicago so I know what you mean when you talk about Zeke growing up in Poverty but he was an Asshole. That has nothing to do with your style of play imo. Hell even Barkley was an asshole but he had a Man of the People sort of personality. Remember the freeze out Zeke pulled on Jordan at the All Star game & Walking off the Court during the Easter Conference Finals all that came back to bite em later on. Plus if you had to pick between him & Jordan being on your team. See ya Zeke!!!

You can make a real case that it goes: Magic, Cousy, and Zeke for all-time great PGs. I’d take Zeke over Nash, Mark Jackson, Chris Paul and pretty much all the rest of them.

And yeah—nowaday we brag about growin up in the hood. Zeke was from an era when everyone was ashamed of being from the hood. So he had a background that ontop of racial bias he was fighting class bias… the stress ol boy was under…

I wrote that about Zeke last summer. Pretty much, a lot of people associate his fails from an executive and coaching standpoint to his caliber of player on the court which is the FURTHEST thing from the truth.

Zeke is certainly better than Nash, Mark Jackson and whoever. Zeke was a DOG. He had everyone on those Bad Boys Pistons teams ready to attack whenever he said the word. That’s a leader. A vindictive, spiteful person, but a leader nonetheless.

I will forever be a Jordan stan as apparent in the things I’ve wrote and said about him here (I tried to get bald head like him and even got myself purposely sick to play like him SMH), but had a HOF player been blackballed from the Olympics like this in 2012, the backlash would have been tremendous.

Having said all that, you have to watch the bridges you burn. And that goes in any profession you find yourself in.

Well they picked the Dream Team in his last year before hopping so he still could’ve made the final 12. The Select team mention was just to point out how he was totally omitted although it wasn’t a good example haha. Shaq’s rookie year was 92-93 so he hadn’t played his first NBA game yet.

Right. I meant he was going into his rookie year. And as much as it pains me, there was no bigger college player than Laettner then. The media just ate up his whole thing. Now if they end up doing a doc on the Dream Team 2, thats gonna have some great names, stories and personalities too

damn basketball culture was different back then. you can argue within each decade it changes. but in this point in 92, with the Dream Team, you can argue that it had a profound affect on how people around the world thought about basketball. I would say that the Fab 5 and the Dream Team together made basketball today the way it is.

This was just plain DOPE from start to finish. I remember watching this when I was 7 years old & it’s still amazing to me 20 years later. After watching this it makes me look at all the other so called “Dream Teams” especially 2004 in Greece. Why did they keep getting blown out? Word to Jadakiss

You know what’s really sad? The most memorable thing about this team was the Sports Illustrated they were the cover of – and NOT because of them. But because of one of the greatest sports articles ever written – “Shadow of a Nation,” toward the back of the issue. It’s online. Do yourself a favor, ESPECIALLY if you truly love basketball, and find it and read it.

I’ve heard talk in recent times about the International Olympic Committee starting to rethink the whole idea of America sending their best professional athletes (think NBA players) to these games. Hmmn… It appears that some countries feel that the playing (basketball) field has become far too “uneven”. I guess many of those countries would love to return to the pre-1989 eras when every four years America’s collegiate basketball squads were consistently getting their butt’s kicked by these countries’ own equivalent pro squads.